iPhone without $20 Data Plan?

[bretm]

FWIW, it varies wildly where I live. Anything over 100kbps is unusual. I'm not sure if it's because AT&T acquired their network from SunCom a year or two ago (instead of building it from the ground themselves), but it's pretty slow here.

Well anything over 10 would be very unusual for a modem!

 

[shadowfax]

Well, a 56k modem only actually achieves 5-10k speeds. Never sure why that was. Download a large file and check the transfer rates. Edge in my town (Atl) always gets over 200k.

The thing is, you're caught up in a "divide by 8" error. dial-up modems transfer at 56 kiloBITS (kb) per second. Your computer usually measures speed in kiloBYTES (kB/KB) per second. 8 bits make one byte. so you need to be dividing your speed by 8 in both the case of dialup and EDGE if you want to get it in kB/s. technically, getting over 7 kBps on a dialup modem is theoretically impossible, although the computer can get very confused about transfer rates sometimes, and read such speeds.

I will qualify that by saying that you CAN get much slower speeds on 56K if you have really, really crappy phone lines.

Anyway, EDGE would have to be 1mbps to be 20 times faster than dialup, so I doubt that's accurate. 5-8 times faster sounds like what many people are getting at best, and 2-3 times at worst. And, honestly, 100kbs is not that much better than dial-up... not when many ISPs these days are 768kbps-1.5mbps.

 

[skavanag]

Did you buy or rent your iPhone?

I agree....if you can't afford the phone (which means service and phone), DO NOT BUY IT...it's like buying a ferrari and complaining about the gas costs...true costs come down to service not the actual car, same thing with this iPhone, if you can't afford the SERVICE, you can't afford the phone.

Let's face it, consumers want choice. One of the big selling points to me was WiFi on my phone - just so I DON"T have to buy a data plan. I am more than happy using my iPhone for phone calls, but instead of carrying my 17" Mac Powerbook, having a small hand-held that I can surf the Web from my hotel room, cafe, or other "hotspot" locale.

I also don't like the fact that if I am NOT on an AT&T plan, that my phone becomes a paper weight. So 2 years from now, you get iPhone++ and want to give your "old" iPhone to your brother, sister, kid....etc - you can't. Because you really don't own it...you just rent it.